Abstract
Three studies test whether people engage in mental state reasoning or theory of mind (ToM) differently across two fundamental social contexts: cooperation and competition. Study 1 examines how children with an emerging understanding of false beliefs deploy ToM across these contexts. We find that young preschool children are better able to plant false beliefs in others' minds in a cooperative versus competitive context; this difference does not emerge for other cognitive capacities tested (e.g., executive functioning, memory). Studies 2a and 2b reveal the same systematic difference in adults' ToM for cooperation and competition, even after accounting for relevant predictors (e.g., preference for a task condition, feelings about deception). Together, these findings provide initial evidence for enhanced ToM for cooperation versus competition in early development and also adulthood.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 19-40 |
| Number of pages | 22 |
| Journal | Social Cognition |
| Volume | 39 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Feb 2021 |
Funding
We thank Catherine Kim, Elizabeth Kroll, Joshua Hirschfeld-Kroen, Kayla Soares, Michael Manalili, and Sophie Cooper for their assistance with data collection. We also thank members of the Boston College Morality Lab and anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this article, the staff of the Living Lab and Science World at TELUS World of Science, and participating families. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (A.S.B.: # 435-2013-0286) and the National Science Foundation (L.Y. and A.W.: #1627157; graduate fellowship to L.T.: #1258923). For Figure 1, we adapted images from OpenMoji (License CC BY-SA 4.0).
Keywords
- Cooperation
- False belief
- Social development
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Social Psychology
- Developmental and Educational Psychology